Hydraulic fracturing is often incorrectly blamed for contaminating water with methane and thus allowing people to set their tap water on fire, but one thing fracking did help set ablaze was Hillary Clinton’s so-called “Midwestern Firewall.”

Last week the presidential hopes of Senator Rand Paul took a serious blow. The Kentucky House of Representatives allowed a bill to die without a vote that would have permitted candidates to run for more than one elected office at at time. The bill could be revisited in the next legislative session, which begins in January 2015, but the House does not appear eager to pass the bill at all. And even if it did, Senator Paul would already be months behind other Republican contenders for the presidency in starting on the campaign trail.